Thou Shalt Not Let Values Vultures Win School Debate

June 24, 1999|By Eric Zorn.

Ever wonder why it's the ancient 10 Commandments that social conservatives want to post in public school classrooms instead of, say, a modern list of mandates?

Think about it. If you were limited to 10 salubrious exhortations for students, would you spend one forbidding them to make graven images? Would you spend another warning against Sabbath breaking? And is adultery practiced often enough by schoolchildren to include a prohibition on such a short list?

Don't steal, lie, cuss or commit murder. Those Commandments you'd probably use. Respect and honor not just your folks but everyone who's not forfeited respect and honor. Don't be a bigot, be cautious and responsible with your body in all ways, be polite, share and just generally treat others as you would wish to be treated. Voila! A broadly palatable roster of values.

But no. It has to be the Commandments, as it was again last week when the House of Representatives voted to permit public schools to display them. And why that particular list? Because the message of the Commandments as a whole is that God makes the rules--that things are not right or wrong because human beings applying reason in the context of their civic institutions have decided that they should be right or wrong, but because God says so.

For those who say they believe in moral absolutes, the Commandments are a beacon--the ultimate argument-ender in the rhetorical squabbles with the dreaded and grotesquely stereotyped believers in moral relativism. Without God as a reference, the absolutists insist, all standards, values and virtues are simply matters of opinion, and social chaos results.

But belief about what God says and doesn't say is itself a matter of opinion. Those who insist that they know for a fact how God wants people to behave invite new forms of chaos--religious disputes of the sort that have so often resulted in massive bloodshed and other human miseries.

Saying "my Scripture reflects the will of God to which all should yield" doesn't settle the values argument, it simply raises the stakes. It makes it more difficult to split differences, compromise, live and let live and all the other things that allow us to coexist relatively peacefully in an elegantly diverse nation. Another problem: Even those reading the same holy writ have been known to interpret it differently. There's probably no act of persecution or cruelty so sickening that some group somewhere in world history hasn't justified it with a cockeyed spin on an alleged divine pronouncement.

We know such acts are wrong not because some other book or passage forbids them, but because reason tells us so. We know stealing is wrong, for instance, because we know a society that permitted it would not thrive or even survive. It's my position that, back when, men claimed God said stealing is wrong in order to add urgency and oomph to the prohibition and increase its value as a mechanism of social control.

The assertion that without rules handed down from on high there is no basis for right and wrong is absurd. We have an instinctive--some would say God-given--interest in preservation . . . of ourselves, of our kin, of our community and of our culture. The common-sense strictures that lead to such preservation inevitably appear at the core of moral systems: As 19th Century humanist scholar Robert Ingersoll observed, God has shown an uncanny penchant for hating and loving exactly what his human interpreters have hated and loved.

So which runs the risk of being more arbitrary, more "relative," more socially problematic? Moral values based upon the collective reasoning power of the people in a society, or moral values rooted in unchallengeable, unverifiable, disputed but passionately held articles of faith?

Both have their drawbacks. But a founding premise of this country is that the former is a better way to go than the latter and more closely aligns with the tenets of liberty. Even though most of the Founding Fathers, like most people today, would disagree with my belief about the source of morality, it was no oversight that God makes no appearance in the Constitution or Bill of Rights.

Posting the 10 Commandments in public schools is not just government showing kids a few good ideas, but endorsing a profound and particular religious belief. That's why the values vultures want it. And that's why it's a terrible idea.